July 3rd, 2023 marks the one-hundred and sixtieth anniversary of Pickett’s charge at the Battle Of Gettysburg during the American Civil War. July 3rd was the third and final day of that battle and remains the bloodiest day in American history. It was the turning point of the Civil War that marked the beginning of the end for the Army Of North Virginia. General Robert E. Lee had led the Confederate forces north through Maryland and into Pennsylvania on the way to seizing the Union capital. But the Army of the Potomac met Lee in Gettysburg and stopped the advance.
These events were recorded and imbued with life and humanity in the novel The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara. Shaara drew on accounts of those three fateful, bloody days to create an authentic record of events but since nineteenth century biographies and memoirs were written to omit the personal views of subjects he had to invent them himself. In doing this Shaara wrote of the honor of battle and the responsibility of command as officers on both sides debate and strategize their combat plans. These lengthy dialogues that humanize these historical figures provide a cloaked commentary on the Vietnam War.
In The Killer Angels Lee proposes the attack that will shatter his army despite the protestations of his most trusted advisor General James Longstreet. Longstreet’s position places a value on the lives of the soldiers that Lee does not recognize as he sees death in combat as an honorable obligation. Pickett’s charge was a kind of fruitless suicide in much the same way that the American occupation of South Vietnam was a horrendously bloody and pointless exercise. Duty, honor, ego, and over confidence guided both disasters.
Ted Turner’s passion project, a mini-series adaptation of The Killer Angels, Gettysburg (1993) was written it was done so to preserve almost all of Shaara’s dialogue; amounting to one of the most faithful adaptations ever put on screen. But Gettysburg was released almost twenty years after Shaara’s novel so the immediacy and prevalencey of the Vietnam War in the national discourse had greatly dissipated. Now Shaara’s meditations on the philosophy of command were reframed to address war as a general idea or concept.
This reframing of Shaara’s text made the omission of Black voices and a consistent anti-racist stance all the more clear. While the film certainly embraces the abolitionist rhetoric of Col. Chamberlain (Jeff Daniels) it cannot escape the fact that so much of the film requires that the audience sympathizes with Confederate Generals. Even though filmmaker Ronald F. Maxwell tries his best to make the complicated situation of the Confederacy digestible to those without any historical expertise he nevertheless comes off as excusing or sometimes embracing the romantic impulses of the “lost cause”.
Obviously this is problematic for Gettysburg, now more than ever. And while it is true that figures such as Longstreet opposed slavery and that the average soldier was likely fighting for fear of losing his land, the film is not designed to address the racism that still existed within these figures nor the implications of their allegiances with pro-slavery institutions. The film is also unable, despite a few lines here or there, to convey the Southern mentality when it comes to states vs. the federal government. These are complex and nuanced issues better suited to Ken Burns’ Civil War (1990) than to Gettysburg even though the film itself invites the audience to ask these questions.
Controversy aside, Gettysburg does succeed in a number of areas. For one, using re-enactors as the soldiers allowed for a sense of scope and historical accuracy that is unprecedented. Gettysburg captures the look and feel of soldiering during the Civil War in a very visceral way that Ronald F. Maxwell couldn’t even duplicate in Gods & Generals (2003). Gettysburg also puts character before spectacle to effectively create a portrait of war that is entirely focused on tragedy rather than gore, kills, or mutilations. The film puts the viewer in a specific time and place to invite them to feel and think with the vast number of characters in the ensemble in order to paint an anti-war portrait.
Gettysburg also features excellent performances from Jeff Daniels (Lawrence Chamberlain) and Tom Berenger (Longstreet) that elevate the film beyond the heart-string tugging chords of the melodramatic soundtrack. The cast is stacked (Stephen Lang, Martin Sheen, Richard Jordan, W. Morgan Sheppard, Sam Elliott, C. Thomas Howell, as well as cameos by Ted Turner and Ken Burns) with actors who are all clearly committed to the film. Gettysburg is epic filmmaking in the grand style of Griffith and De Mille.
In a strange twist of fate Gettysburg proved so affecting to those who saw it that it revised American popular history as it pertains to James Longstreet. For one-hundred years Longstreet was the scapegoat for the Confederate defeat at Gettysburg despite his and Lee’s own accounts of the battle. In the years of reconstruction, Confederate sympathizers and purveyors of the “lost cause” saw Longstreet as a traitor for collaborating with President Grant’s administration (the two men were close during the Mexican War) and for his part in the Battle Of Liberty Place in 1874. Berenger’s portrayal of Longstreet in Gettysburg dispelled those labels born out of the “lost cause” culture of the South.
Ted Turner was likewise so impressed with Gettysburg that he scrapped the idea of a miniseries and released the four and a half hour film to theaters. This sudden change of heart inevitable hurt the film somewhat. As a theatrical release the episodic structure becomes more apparent as does the limitations of the make-up department’s work. What could have been one of the defining mini-series of the nineties wound up a niche property that appealed almost exclusively to amateur historians and fans of the combat movie.
Yet, to this day, many critics consider Gettysburg to be the finest Civil War film ever made. Any Civil War film is going to be somewhat controversial or problematic because that is simply the nature of that chapter in American history so it is very likely true that no film has ever equaled the power or accuracy of Gettysburg. For many Gettysburg is an annual tradition; a film to be revisited on the eve of the Fourth Of July. It’s strange to think that this terrible battle was fought only eighty-seven years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence and only one-hundred and sixty years ago today. So many things have changed and yet so little of any serious consequence.
